Way back in the summer of 2013, Elon Musk showed off a new piece of tech that could swap the battery of a Tesla Model S in 90 seconds. In one simple move, these battery swap machines made electric cars almost as convenient as their petrol- and diesel-powered brethren. The original plan was to roll out the tech to Supercharger stations in the second half of 2013, but they never emerged. Now, a single Supercharger station in Harris Ranch California has been equipped with the battery swap tech, and Tesla has started inviting some Model S owners to come try it out.

The idea of Battery Swap (yes, that’s its official name) is to provide a faster but more expensive option for Model S owners in need of a quick recharge. As it stands, Tesla owners can rock up to any Supercharger and get a free charge — but it takes 75 minutes to recharge the battery completely (or about 30 minutes for a half-charge). This is fine if you’re stopping for lunch, or you’re in no rush to get somewhere — but obviously conventional automobiles, with their rapidly pumped hydrocarbon fuel available on almost every street corner, have a sizable advantage when it comes to refilling.

Battery Swap was intended to bridge this gap between electric and conventional vehicles. You roll up to a Supercharging station in your Model S, maneuver your car over the special Battery Swap gizmo, and then wait while it unbolts your battery and swaps in a new one. Back in June 2013, Musk showed a Battery Swap that took just 90 seconds — while it took a full three minutes for an Audi to fill its tanks with gas. While conventional Supercharging is free, Tesla estimated a cost of around $60 to $80 for a Battery Swap (i.e. about the same price as filling up with gas). In theory, you would then return at some later date to pick up your original battery pack, or have your original battery pack delivered to your home (this part of the process isn’t fully fleshed out yet).

Anyway, Tesla wanted to roll out Battery Swap to its Supercharger stations in late 2013 — but for some reason it never happened. Judging by the Tesla blog post announcing the start of the Battery Swap Pilot Program, it sounds like the delays might have been due to the additional titanium and aluminium shielding that was added to the Model S following a couple of battery fires. The shielding has to be removed before the battery can be swapped out, and obviously that required some changes to the machinery. Due to these additional steps, the battery swap now takes “approximately three minutes” (so, the same as the gas-powered Audi!), but Tesla is “confident that the swap time could be reduced to less than one minute” in the future.

The Tesla Model S’s battery pack is that big flat area in the middle, protected by ‘ballistic-grade’ aluminium. A new Model S would have a titanium shield, too.)

Tesla Model S recharge time at a Supercharger station – it’s fast, but… still very slow

To begin with, Battery Swap is only available by appointment, “across the street from the Tesla Superchargers at Harris Ranch, California.” It sounds like Tesla is asking Model S owners to come on down and try out the battery swap — so it’s more of an early alpha test, rather than a full-blown beta test where a few Model S drivers are using Battery Swap on a daily basis. Given the value of a Model S battery pack ($10,000+), and the potential logistics nightmare of tracking who owns which battery pack (and then shipping them around the country), I suspect it’ll be a while before we see a full-scale roll-out of Battery Swap.

In an ideal world, Battery Swap would be rolled into the cost of a Tesla car — rather than owning the battery pack that’s attached to your car, Tesla would instead permanently loan out battery packs. Each Supercharger station would just slot in the best battery pack that it currently has available, and retire (or recondition) battery packs when their range drops below a certain threshold. Tesla would need lots of batteries to make it work, of course — especially once the mass-market Model 3 arrives — but that’s what the Gigafactory is for!

We’re huge fans of Tesla and have been excited to see this new tech roll out! Exciting times ahead.

bmwman91

Elon Musk…the Tony Stark of real life. The Silicon Valley is full of megalomaniac billionaires with god complexes, but Musk gives me hope. He is one of very few people with that kind of money that actually seems to be aware that he does not NEED that kind of money, so he chooses to pump it into human progress projects.

greeneggmedia

We were at the Vanity Fair summit with Elon a few months ago, and his vision is really amazing. Between Tesla and SpaceX, he is really shaping the future.

Daniel Glass

The car still has a 3-4 hour range from full charge at highway speeds, taking a 20-30 minute break in the middle of that is good for you.

Phakey Prophile

It is good for you, but it’s not how people currently drive gas vehicles.

Daniel Glass

Yeah, the vast majority use them to run around town on a day to day basis, not long road trips.

Scott Jackson

$60-80 seems a bit pricey to just have a machine switch out a battery. I assume this cost will drop to very little or even free once the batteries become permanent loaners and you don’t have to get your original back (as mentioned in the last paragraph).

Phakey Prophile

$60-80 for a gas fill up is also really high for a car, even in California. I think $20 would be plenty for a battery swap.

The “loaner” batteries would need to be permanent also as shipping them around would be expensive and difficult. You’d have to be at a station just to have it re-installed anyway, so that concept seems ridiculous.

They would also need a tamper-proof system as well as a verified owner/last user tracking feature but that could be handled behind the scene. There was a previous article on ET about Musk hiring hackers to help prevent issues like that.

Mirimon

er, $100 plus a tank, at places I wouldn’t even want to get gas despite their low prices. (fyi, more and more will “premium” be pushed while mid and low are phased)..

60-80 is cheaper already than what many pay now, AND, that’s to be instantly on the road again in half the time. IMO, if on a road trip, just do the normal charge, take a break, stretch, nap, eat some food, play it safe and enjoy the journey. Better than sleeping at the wheel and killing your car and others…

That’s the extreme price, not even close to the average. Tesla’s range is equivalent to a 14 gallon compact, and not even close to an equivalent mercedes s class with 25 hwy mpg and a 21g tank.

Costs me about $40 to fill up and that’s about 350 miles.

$20 seems plenty, you’re only paying for electricity and the robots to unscrew some bolts. Why would you pay 60-80 for a full charge of electricity?

If you’re going to pay as much as a full tank of gas, then why not have a gas vehicle and drive much further.

Mirimon

The average (these are averages of the most used vehicles in the US, not the average of different types) range of a vehicle in the U.S. is actually 390 miles, average amount SPENT per gallon is actually ~$2.74, the actual average size of tank in said vehicle is ~19 gallons, and the average mpg of the average american vehicle is barely 20mpg highway…that’s $52, on the average for a full tank THIS YEAR (which is a decent year, compared to many others so far..
Sure, I could hop into my Audi, it’s and extreme getting about 590 miles a tank, costing me $36 to top off… pretty damn good. Though, being a man, I am much more likely to drive my truck, and lets be real, that thing isn’t cheap, given it’s size of tank alone, not even to mention that it would be lucky to see 15 mpg with the best habits on the highway.. it’s actually a new model at that.

Honestly, we had better cars in 1938, able to get 30 mpg while doing 200+ mph, yet weighing 3 times what my truck does…..

their asking price, to use a costly robotic, automated system to completely swap out your entire pack, as is, for a certified and maintained completely charged one in 1/2 the time it takes you to fill the tank in a civic….. imo, not bad, and especially for a business having to arm wrestle every representative in every state who doesn’t want a dent taken out of their big oil kick-backs… Were Tesla able to focus on the average Joe like their goal is, it would be a different story all together and a $20 price for such a service might happen, but atm, 140k cars, for people generally well off in the first place, in a market they are having a hard time getting a foothold into due to opposition for all the wrong reasons…. eh…

I have hopes for them, I really do, and this is one of the companies the nation should really be getting behind.

trialcritic

The idea is that people use the swaps initially for trips in both direction, i.e, you go from point A to point B and return back to A. This way, you can return the battery and get your old one back. The battery is the most expensive part of the car currently due to the battery technology not having big improvements yet. Once this improves, the swap cost will reduce, it will be a while to go down to $20 (if it ever will).

Tesla is also looking at improvements in charging technology and hopes to eventually bring it down to about 5 min to recharge. This will be free and you do not need swaps. Do note that Tesla is a performance car and you compare it to cars which use premium fuel. A car like BMW will take more to refuel than a traditional Ford. They also take more fuel due to MPG being lower. Please compare apples to apples.

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